Here we are again
My family watches TV together over dinner several nights a week. Right now we've started a rewatch of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
It's a rewatch, because I first saw it on an actual honest to god television when it originally aired. (Yes, I'm internet old.) I was super into Trek as a kid; I drifted out of it as I got older and more interested in fantasy.
The other day I went through an old, old storage box full of my stuff. It had been sitting there pretty much untouched (by me; the mice touched it a lot) for around 25 years. It had my ninth grade homework, my Barbie bathtub, some plastic beads, some construction paper Christmas ornaments. It also had a lot of papers and notebooks in which I had written long lists of invented names, and the beginnings of adorably inane fantasy stories, and terrible-to-middling poetry, and also at one point a short list of Trek episodes, without comment. At the top of the list was the TNG ep "When The Bough Breaks".
Which was the episode we got to tonight.
And small me wasn't wrong. It's definitely one of the stronger episodes in this wobbly first season.
It's the one where the super advanced aliens (that look exactly like humans) have all become infertile, and to avoid their super advanced civilization becoming super extinct, they kidnap a bunch of kids off the Enterprise, ranging from Ensign Crusher down to an adorable moppet named Alexandra, and then they get all insulted when the Enterprise isn't interested in their offers of "compensation".
You know. It's Star Trek. There are a lot of impassioned speeches and cool special effects and in the end it all turns out okay. But two things stood out to me, (checks notes) 37 years later:
- All the kids get assigned to their new families and occupations, because of course the aliens know best what future professions are best suited to these random-ass kids they stole. They are wooed with snacks and toys and super advanced alien tools that allow them to instantly create polished, perfect art out of, idk, vibes.
I said to my brother, "This is interesting to watch in the age of generative AI."
He said, "Eeeyup."
- Wesley Crusher is not having any, thanks. He is calm, he is composed, he is polite and sympathetic, and he pushes back against every blandishment the super advanced aliens try on him. Like he's what, fifteen? and admittedly a sometimes slightly stuffy fifteen, but he behaves really well in this situation.
(Honestly, I have never understood the instant backlash against him. Yeah, maybe he gets annoying after a while, but in this first stretch of episodes, he's... just a kid. Sometimes cute. Sometimes a twerp. Sometimes both at once. I didn't get the hate then and I don't now.)
And he gathers the younger kids and explains to them about passive resistance in language they can understand ("this is our way of telling them we want to go home"), and supports them through it, and that's not what gets them out but it keeps those kids from buckling until the adults can put together a workable rescue.
It just really hit me, tonight. We can't always rescue each other, but we can help one another hold on.